Never considered myself a fast reader as I am indeed slow when it comes to reading – taking into account of everything going on that you’d have to deal with before you can sit down and read. Also, and more to it, I enjoy savoring the reading process, especially for a good book, at the glacial speed when time permits. J It’s just a personal habit, not something I’m proud of, though.
But with the book, The Glass Castle《玻璃城堡》, I’ve set a record for myself – finished it in less than three days. The story is compelling, heart-wrenching, inspiring, and humorous too. The author tells her story with such a poignancy and insight into the human nature on so many levels that you can’t help but submerge yourself into the world depicted in the book and keep on reading until you reach the very end of it.
The book is a memoir written by Jeannette Walls, an established journalist who works for MSNBC. For a memoir, what people would, more often than not, expect is a personal story with less drama, not so much anticipated storyline, as opposed to a fiction. And quite often a memoir comes with plain, or maybe even dull, language. However, Jeannette Wall’s book’s got everything a reader can possibly be looking for in a fiction, only it’s not. It’s an authentic family saga, teemed with all kinds of twists and turns beyond one’s imagination, about their nomadic journey along which they roamed from desert to mountain to country and to city, driven by poverty, fantasy, desperation, ambition, pursuance of freedom, getaway from debts and last but absolutely not the least, the romance of nomadic life. The plots are complicated, so are the characters. You’d be unexpectedly surprised literally at every single turn and constantly exclaim in awe, "Is this for real?" It’s even more intriguing to me than a fictional writing.
It’s already out of the ordinary to know a family in the modern American society can be so poor living in a squalid shack, kids sleeping in cardboard boxes and looting through garbage for food to eat; however, it’s even more bizarre to realize that it was the family, the parents to be exact, that chose to live in such poverty and hardship, and eventually ended up being on the streets by their own choice.
Jeannette Walls’ father, Rex Walls, was a strange mix of a genius in math and physics, a reckless wino, an avid daydreamer and a social misfit who couldn’t fit into society because of his obstinate self-righteousness – he argued with preachers every time he walked into a church; he scorned doctors in hospital when he had a different opinion about his daughter's health; he fought his bosses, cops, government agents all the time to justify his atypical behaviors and ideas, and so on. Rex Walls’ character well reminds me of Don Quixote in Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, a unrealistic, self-deceptive cavalier who’s constantly defeated in the real world while he still sticks up for his illusory ideas.
Nevertheless, Rex was brilliant with science, knowledgeable in math, physics, astronomy, and he even kept himself up to date with the quantum theory, something that not many people are capable enough to understand well. But, the problem with Rex was that he had all kinds of big ideas with his life, but always stopped short of the determination to materialize them. The title of the book is actually connotative of the father’s character, in that the glass castle is actually the dream house he well designed down to every single detail on the blueprint a decade ago and promised his family over and over he would one day build it, except he never got a will, nor the desire to make money for it, to break ground.
As eccentric as he may be, Rex was a loving hu*****and and caring father. He was unconditionally devoted to his wife and his children, in his own words, “I’ve never let you down, have I?" On a Christmas Eve when Jeannette was five, Rex, almost a down-and-out who couldn't afford any holiday gift for his kids, brought Jeannette out in a desert, and told her to choose her favorite star from the constellations in the milk way as her Christmas gift. She chose Venus, the most bright one in the sky, which he told her it would be hers once she’d chosen. I am deeply touched by the scene imagining how hard this would be for Rex when he had no choice but let her daughter to wish a star as a Christmas gift. Now, the gift here is intangible and ethereal -- probably sounds like a joke to many people, yet Rex's tender paternal feeling is utterly tangible and noble. However, on the other hand he could turn himself into a completely different person in no time when he's got drunk. My heart sinks when I read the chapter where he broke the piggy bank and stole all the money his children worked so hard for a whole year to save up for their planned trip to New York, so that he could buy himself alcohol to get drunk.
The mother, Rose Mary Walls, was another kind of idiosyncratic personality who pretty much shared Rex’s mentality. If, character wise, Rex was a modern Don Quixote who took on the whole world, then Rose Mary was “one female Don Quixote”, if you will, who evaded the real world. She was a teacher by trade, but an artist at heart who took great pleasure in painting, reading and writing. Being out of tune with the real world, she didn't want to work to support the family because she didn’t think she was made for that; instead, she wrapped herself up tightly in her little artistic cocoon fancying one day her art works would be discovered and lauded by the whole world as valuable as Picasso’s. In reality, neither her paintings nor her writings had ever got a close chance to be published, for that she blamed the family for wearing her down on her path to be an artist.
Rose Mary was a well-educated and affectionate mother. She often gave her children a judicious advice when they were at the crossroad of their lives. As in Jeannette’s eyes, her mom is as wise as a philosopher can be, which is indeed laid bare by Rose Mary’s own astute, witty words regarding art, history and human's nature throughout the book. Nonetheless, in daily life beyond her own “ivory tower", she was so inept and often miserably dwarfed in front of her own children. It arouses my indignation at the chapter where the kids had to literally drag her out of the bed (it actually was a dilapidated couch she slept on as the family couldn’t afford a bed) in the morning when she had a meltdown, which happened quite often, and resisted to get up and go to work; and more sadly, she had once gained weight by eating chocolate, an extremely rare nutrition source for the family that she hid from her children, on the sly while her children had nothing sufficient to eat for days. Even though she felt some qualms at staying away from her maternal responsibilities for her children, in the end she was always defeated by her laziness and her fear to face the outside world.
Alright, I’d better stop here before I give away too much of the story.
What strikes me the most in this book is the intricacy and obscurity of humanity revealed through Jeannette Walls’ family story, in which the boundaries between unconditional love and selfishness, parental care and individual’s survival instinct are all becoming blurry and ambivalent when they are symbiotically demonstrated by the same person. In Rex and Rose Mary's case, it's insurmountable to simply make an ethical judgment as to whether they were good or bad parents, since they represented different traits of character, oftentimes contradictory to each other, on the spectrum of morality, and oscillated from extreme to extreme -- they were evil parents being reckless one day, and then redeemed themselves the next by doing something glorious. This would be a reality that’s hard to accept for those, me included, who’ve got used to the “either-or” thinking mode since we all intrinsically tend to seek the purity of love without giving much consideration to the fact that all human beings are flawed and imperfect, or sinned in biblical term, and so are their feelings and characters. Good and bad, merit and weakness, positivity and negativity, virtue and ignominy, etc., they all co-exist and intertwine in real life. This is something many people may not want to face, especially for their loved ones, but they unfortunately don’t have much choice, as the pure and uncontaminated love only exist in a Utopian society.
Writing a memoir as honest as it can be with such naked-truth, Jeannette Walls’ courage is beyond being admirable, and it’s all the more so to take into account that she'd worked her way up and became a journalist, a glamorous career that’s well connected to the upper class society and celebrity circle. Of course, she did this not without struggle and worry before she could write the book unfolding her miserable childhood and the inglorious sides of her parents. She actually reflected her struggle with vivid depiction in the very beginning of the book, where on the way to a fabulous party she saw her mom who, a homeless by then, was rooting through trash on the street. She debated with herself whether she should say hi to her homeless mom in front of people, but felt too embarrassed to do so and went away. It adds a little irony that in the end it was her mom who gave her an advice, once again as she did sagaciously many times before, “tell people the truth”, when Jeannette asked her what she should tell people about her mom.
The characters of Jeannette Walls’ parents, Rex and Rose Mary, perplex me in the way that I’m not so sure whether I should feel sympathetic for them or not. They’re smart, educated, capable of making a good life. But they choose not to. Rather, against the all odds they chose to live their lives the way they wanted, even to wind up on the streets and become homeless. Apart from their oddity that's not accepted by any standard in our society, there’s something exceptional about their choice: an impulse and tenacity to pursue their freedom. Opposite to common sense, Rex was happy with, actually enjoyed, being down and out and constantly on the run. To him, nomad life is romantic, with which nothing can compare. Thus, he loathed the office-bound urban life style and rejoiced to settle his home in a desert where the resources were extremely slim. But, he was always in ecstasy when he was in touch with nature. In Rose’s case, she loved painting and art, carefree about what other people’s opinions about herself. Poverty didn't seem to bother her much as long as she could pamper herself in her art world. To both of them, the freedom to pursue the things they loved with their hearts was much more superior than any other material things. And in doing so, they held their heads high with dignity and be content with who they are and where they are. This is the part that sets them apart from other ordinary people, be it rich or poor: the life choice they made is an absolute defeat in the real world, yet a triumph of their soaring free spirit.
It’s essentially a tragedy in a ultimate sense that human beings, in many cases if not all, have to make a hard choice between pursuing their freedom at the cost of the failure of their real life and willing to bend over and succumb their free will to the reality like the majority of people in our society would do.
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